Tag: A day in the life

The Brilliant Idea

So I’m sitting at the desk whiling away the hours until midnight by reading blogs from back when I first discovered the activity. Hats off to LukeLog and Meg (who used to be NotSoSoft back in the day). Reading as these kids / folks / people really invested a lot of effort in exploring the form. I certainly won’t get in to who discovered what when, but for me these folks were pioneering. It was through them that I discovered MeFi which actually was side linked from the Underground IIRC.

What really strikes me now is how conversant they were with the form. Not necessarily the most technically / design / content incline but definitely the best at reviving the vanity site of yore. For me they hit the right balance between geek, personal life, and connections. It was all quite inspiring as I was just starting to rediscover the web myself after years of no computer and no connection. I was testing the waters with graduate school and information science and I saw how I could integrate what they’re doing with my own ideas about information presentation and retrieval.

At the same time I was also working with/for a guy who was strictly old school in the technology department. Not that he didn’t have nice toys or shunned new technology (although he does the latter somewhat) but he was rigid about the least tool necessary for a task. We did not use a graphical IDE for development. We definitely shunned the use of flash and minimized the images. We were on the edge w/r/t implementing CSS driven sites. Server-side scripting? Rriiiiigggghhht.

I’ve taken a lot of that forward with me. In my MIS program I was a bit snobbish about the HTML and code my classmates generated. I often let this snobbery get in the way of appreciating the larger lesson. Moving into my first real, bona fide professional position I made my life a great deal more difficult because of some zealous adherence to an amalgamation of XHTML Strict / CSS / 508c / Nielsen rules. Now at my most recent position I am still fighting my first boss’s battles.

And I’m really not sure it’s worth it. Either that or I’ve ended up in the wrong place professionally. Slowly but surely, the web design field is moving beyond my skill set. I’m very focused on programmatic solutions and automated text processing while the broader audience could care less about these things. I keep waiting for the vindication. Well, okay, the CSS / XHTML thing is starting to pay off. But I’ve got staff who think nothing of bundling instructional tutorials in Flash instead of interactive DHTML. I’m falling behind playing with AJAX because I continue to have to keep the bailing wire web site I inherited together. And I don’t have the opportunity to pursue this on my own time because I’ve elected to try having a social life and meaningful relationship outside of work.

Then there’s the whole missing out on ontologies and metadata angle which was the thing that most interested me in school. I just cannot seem to find an entry into the professional ranks and now I’m not even certain what’s left of my knowledge is even relevant.

And so I whine as I sit at the desk whiling away the hours until midnight…

Watusi Redux

So I offered to help my pops throw together a poster that he is presenting at a conference in October. It’s his master’s thesis work and he’s noticeably nervous about the whole ordeal. I’ve put together an assfull of posters both for myself and for others at the previous jobby job so it’s not a huge deal. Bold yet neutral colors. Delineate segments without walling section off. No font smaller than 18pt (preferrably 24pt). Yadda yadda yadda.

And while I’m not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination, I have always had a curiosity about typography and read about it in my spare time. So no skin off my back. After a few iterations, I’ve got something I’m okay with and the pops is pleased it would seem. Hopefully it’ll give the guy some added confidence.

But my bone to pick is as follows—and there is always a bone to pick, no? No bones makes for a saggy blog. Anyway, so he works for an unmentioned federal agency that deals with cereal grains and the like. This is fine and good. But WTF is up with their technical requirements? Seriously. I had no idea—and again, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while, albeit in a one-off manner—that PowerPoint is the preferred poster file format. Seriously. Not Illustrator / Photoshop / whatever-the-heck Gimp uses / SVG / LaTeXT or even PDF. No. They require their posters be done in ppt.

They’re friggin’ scientists! They ought to know better. The file format isn’t designed for this kind of use. It generates big (not massive at least) files and is prone to corruption, freezes, crashing, raping your daughter. My work rendered as PPT == 14.7 MB. The same rendered in PDF == just over 900Kb.

Unbelievable. Which, when you get down to it, totally is believable. I hear about graduate students writing their thesis in Word. I’ve seen relational databases erected in Excel. I’ve seen web pages served as JPG or PDF. There is one project that I was forced into linking to the web site at work that was a set of HTML pages done as PPT. They were so excited because they could click text in one slide and it would flip to some other arbitrary slide in their presentation. Seriously.

I know, technology prima donna and all that. Yes. I am guilty. But, and I really hate to type this out…

what.the.fuck?

I don’t pull the boat with my Prius. I don’t use a spark plug as a standard blade screwdriver. I don’t mow the yard with a weed whacker. And I don’t mess around with Jim. There are tasks and there are tools that might get the task done as well as tools that are designed to complete that task. Use the designed tools and you will be a happier person.

That, and I won’t have to type this rant again.

I Do The Watusi

The more I write these posts, the more I realize that they all seem to come with some bad ’80s earwig. The SWMBO’s brother is moving in with us for a bit and what runs through my mind? Howie Mandell. It’s like my attachment to novelty and found music has grown to be about seven feet tall and sports fangs and claws. Either that or it has become a giant shark with a laser cannon surgically mounted to its head.

What?! Where was I?

Oh, yeah, the As-Good-As-Brother-In-Law is moving in for a bit. Which is cool. I’ll have plenty of opportunity to hone my xBox hockey skills if nothing else. But there’s this weird soundtrack running at low volume in the back of my head and it’s just the refrain from that damned Howie Mandell song…

what can you do?
I do the watusi

And that, gentle reader, is what is going to cause me to climb with my trusty sniper’s rifle to the top of the bell tower here on campus. Of course, with my fear of heights I’ll probably make it about ten feet up and then turn around and go home.

I mean I sit here and picture a sillier me (scary!) walking around aimlessly. From my vantage point, the guy is just walking around. Occasionally he stops and shrugs his shoulders and then does a few watusi steps. I don’t know why. All I *do* know is that I’m probably going to be crossing the street to put as much distance as I can between myself and this sillier me if forced to pass him by.

Oh, and I’m waiting for my new install of the Europa edition of Eclipse to install all the nifty extensions I carried on my old standard Eclipse install. I should really figure out a better workflow than to rely on the Aptana synchronize to remote server when moving code to the production environment.

My Kleenix Overfloweth…

The ragweed / whatever-the-heck-it-is that is making me sneeze and snot on everything, both vertical and horizontal, absolutely needs to stop. Mowed the yard yesterday and got about three minutes into the second bag o’ grass (heh) before the uncontrollable sneezing set in. Thought I was going to blow a gasket. Went inside and grabbed the fake-a-dryl which got me through mowing at least. I started moving the mulch/compost pile neé Brian’s dumping ground into reasonable piles of like materials. Then Elz comes around the corner with some water and talks me into going to the dog park instead. Not a lot of talking needed to happen mind you.

So we get in the Egglet and wrangle the dogs into back seat and strike out for NW Omaha. I swear we’re about three blocks into the drive and Elz is all, “let’s just go around the block and head home.” The goal, apparently, was to keep me from swinging an ax—that which gave me a 14 day stiff neck of biblical proportions.

Instead of the dog park, then, we head off to get frozen custard for ourselves and, in a moment of weakness on my part, for the dogs too. The Toaster knows how to eat off a spoon and was able to get through his custard with nary a drip or spatter. Dr. Salt, on the other hand, was a hurricane of sloppy eating. Dribbles all over the sidewalk and his beard is entirely matted now. Looks even scruffier than usual, which is hard to do.

So then we head home, which is where this story is going ultimately. No sooner do I get in the door than the antihistamines went in to full effect. It was like I was operating under seven to ten feet of cotton balls soaked in ether. I’ve never been so hammered by those things before in my life.

Which scares me. Because I had to take one this morning just to start to feel like I could get to work. I can’t imagine how non-productive I’ll be in about two hours…

En Vogue

Way back in the day I spent many a night in a nightclub necking with some goth chick who, in all likelihood, was probably too young. Then again, I didn’t know enough German to ask and she didn’t know enough English to get that point across anyway. Not that it all matters because what this is so far is window dressing.

Window dressing because all I can think of as I sit here to start typing all blog-like after so many years of false starts and code and real life falling apartness is that stupid song from En Vogue that played incessantly at Le Metropol. You know, the one that hammers “Back to life, back to reality” into your brain over and over so that it becomes one of the more obstinate earwigs in my life.

And, so, yeah. I’m pushing out toward the top end of my thirties and I’m on the upswing after some weird-ass shit going down and all I can do is recite En Vogue lyrics in my head. This is despite the good funk rolling out of the speakers, the two dogs who are fighting over a squeaky toy at my feet (try getting a dog past the ex), and a beautiful woman sitting at the desk beside mine. She Sims while I code.

Yeeaarrrgghh! It’s damn difficult to account for the past few years in a single entry and still sound upbeat. Either there’s a whole lot of saccharine platitudes or there’s a morose, brooding man crying into his beer. Believe me, life is too good for me right now to get in to that. So, this all being the case, I’ll just have to bring y’all up to speed as we go along. Welcome back, campers.

I’m off to get a beer and then I’ll return to play around with WP’s templates a bit. Get anyone anything while I’m up?